Boston Globe

Four men and a woman were arrested in connection with an investigation into allegations of physical and emotional abuse of students at Eagleton School, a private special needs school for boys and young men in Great Barrington.

...The Eagleton School is a residential school for students aged 9 to 22 who have autism, Asperger syndrome, and other cognitive disabilities. It is on 40 acres in the Berkshire Mountains.

I have no words for stories like these.  Imagine what will happen when hundreds of thousands of autistic adults are in residential care in the coming years. 

Foreign Policy Journal

This is a documented case of massive corruption within the CDC and an attempt to change research, protocols and ultimately hide their own findings.

 The video is being circulated.

Fox26 Houston

This Houston mom is upset because her 11 year old son was given three vaccines at school without her permission on Jan 21. One was the shot for HPV.  The other two were ones he'd already received.  The reporter ended the story saying,

"We're glad to report, no negative health impact."  That's hardly proof of anything since this happened only a week and a half ago.  One might ask why vaccines are being given at school in the first place.

The Jewish Chronicle

...It soon became clear that the mysterious rise in diagnoses was not restricted to California, where I live. The same thing was happening all over the world.

To put the rising numbers in context, I familiarised myself with the basic time-line of autism history, learning the story of how this baffling condition was first discovered in 1943 by a child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner, who noticed that 11 of his young patients seemed to inhabit private worlds, ignoring the people around them. They could amuse themselves for hours with little rituals like spinning pot lids on the floor, but they were panicked by the smallest changes in their environments, such as a chair or favourite toy being moved from its usual place without their knowledge. Some of these children were unable to speak, while others only repeated things they heard said around them or spoke of themselves detachedly in the third person.

...As the mainstream world had a long argument about vaccines, newly diagnosed adults were engaged in a very different conversation about the difficulties of navigating and surviving in a world not built for them. By sharing the stories of their lives, they discovered that many of the challenges they face daily are not "symptoms" of their autism, but hardships imposed by a society that refuses to make basic accommodations for people with cognitive disabilities as it does for people with physical disabilities such as blindness and deafness.

A seemingly simple question began to formulate in my mind: After 70 years of research on autism, why do we still seem to know so little about it? To find the answer, I decided to start my research at the very beginning, even before Kanner's and Asperger's allegedly independent discoveries of autism in the 1940s. By taking nothing for granted, I learned that the standard time-line of autism history - its creation myth, so to speak - is fundamentally flawed in ways that render autistic people in previous generations harder to see.

...Though the spectrum model of autism and the concept of neurodiversity are widely believed to be products of our postmodern world, they turn out to be very old ideas, proposed by Hans Asperger in his first public lecture on autism in 1938.

The idea of neurodiversity has inspired the creation of a rapidly growing civil-rights movement based on the simple idea that the most astute interpreters of autistic behaviour are autistic people themselves rather than their parents or doctors.

I found this story from a couple of months ago.  Silberman again blames society for being distracted with the vaccine controversy while refusing "to make basic accommodations for people with cognitive disabilities..."  It seems that all the greater awareness has not been followed up with compassionate care and concern like we have for people with physical disabilities.  We should all be asking how that could possibly be true.